It’s 5.24am on Saturday morning in the northern suburbs of Africa’s financial capital. I’ve just finished two hours re-editing a DVD for the big-screen display at the hottest party in town tonight. (Club Y at Carfax, Newtown, if you must know.) Now, there’s the obligatory wait for the video to render. (That’s geek speak for […]
Media
Posted inBusiness, Media, Tech
Beware the business blog: Seven ground rules
These guidelines for business blogs were written in early 2006, but still apply: 1. Blogs are forever — or at least their content can be captured and stored elsewhere, even after you change or update it, so don’t write anything you may wish you’d never said. South Africa has already had a few blog lawsuits […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media
Sexpo revealed — with video
Is this going to an Eyes Wide Shut experience? Will Dirk Diggler be there showing off his manhood? Can I cop a feel or what? This Sexpo thing had me wondering from the moment I saw the first of many billboards around Johannesburg. When I heard “a guy would be painting with his … ahem […]
Posted inMedia
From MyMedia to OurMedia
This piece began life as a response to Zukile Majova’s rather verbose entry on “National interest versus public interest“, but the more I wrote the more I found myself including my own definitions and/or interpretations to the debate. Eventually I decided that I should probably treat this as something more of my own verbose rant […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
‘Unauthorised’ Mbeki doccie screened
The “unauthorised” documentary about South African president Thabo Mbeki has finally been screened on the SABC, after more than a year of to-ing and fro-ing.
Posted inMedia
Fudging circulation figures
No doubt you’ve all heard about the shenanigans going on over at Media24, admitting that 12 of its 60 magazine titles have “fudged” their circulation figures. (Read more here) This got me to thinking once again about just how transparent online is. For years, advertisers have trusted circulation reports for print. But what I now […]
Posted inLifestyle, Media, Tech
Blogging Player of the Week: One more, with feeling
You may not have heard of this week’s choice for blogging Player of the Week, but you have probably come across her writing, reporting and commentary — probably in isolation of the bigger picture of the amazing work she does in her blogs. Damaria Senne makes her living from covering technology issues for ITWeb, but […]
Posted inMedia, Tech
Radiohead’s brave new world
On Monday Radiohead sent shockwaves through the music industry and paroxysms of fear through the major record labels when they announced that their new album In Rainbows would go on sale on the 10th October as a direct digital rights management (DRM) free download from their website. The price: whatever you feel like paying for […]
Posted inMedia, News/Politics
You didn’t get this from me …
Al Neuharth, the founder of USA Today, the United States’s largest newspaper, once remarked that “anonymous sources are the root of all evil in journalism”. That may have been an overstatement, but not by much. In many cases, journalists can’t do their jobs without using anonymous sources; often, however, they are simply an excuse for […]
Posted inBusiness, Media, Sport
No sporting chance
South Africa’s newly licensed pay-TV operators are going to find themselves playing catch-up in the sporting arena, because MultiChoice has all but taken them out of the game. Sport equals big money and with three pay-TV broadcasters set to enter the market, the stakes are going to get much higher. Most pay-TV players or analysts […]
Posted inMedia, Tech
SA’s poor-quality and pixellated picture sites
We can all agree that due to increased bandwidth availability over the past years, online media quality and quantity have grown substantially. So why the hell are local online publishers dragging their feet and being so schnoep with their bits and bytes?! Gone are the days of 800×600 resolution! And gone are the days where […]
Posted inMedia
How Twitter inspired the creation of a newsroom
Twitter has been criticised almost as much as it has been used since it went public just more than a year ago. The most common criticism aims at the very question all Twitter users are meant to answer: “What are you doing?” (Anybody who doesn’t know what Twitter is can find it wonderfully explained by […]